2 out of 5

Created by: Dan Schneider, Dana Olsen

Moving past that the wish-fulfillment plot makes very little sense, tweener show maestro Dan Schneider (iCarly, Drake & Josh) finds another talented batch of kids and swirls them with tosses them into a silly mix with muscled goofball Cooper Barnes to produce ‘Henry Danger,’ a show which definitely taps into the current superhero craze and dabbles in the uncomfortable immature awareness humor of today’s Nickelodeon live action demographic audience… to, after a bumpy ramp up, pretty hilarious effect, actually.  Unfortunately, that lack of plotting sense becomes all the more apparent when the show abandons all but the barest connection to its setup (as in… the characters) and turns into a typical Nick show.

Jace Norman plays Henry, who goes to apply for an after school job and ends up going through a weird hazing ritual that turns out to be a test to become… Captain Man’s (Barnes) sidekick.  Captain Man is the local hero, y’see, and is indestructible due to something something, and he “realizes” he needs assistance and so of course hires a kid to be his sidekick.  The kid doesn’t really have any powers or training, but why not.  Sure, this harkens back to Batman and Robin and every other teen sidekick, but Superboy could fly and Robin had to learn how to scuffle.  Henry gets a costume.  But, cool, kid superhero, so we’ll skip over the questionable origin (you can review it during the tedious spoken intro to every introduction) and get to the hijinks, which, initially, are a slew of silly villains that our duo must hinky choreograph or cheaply CGI their way out of.  It’s… dumb, but there’s an earnestness to it (and a B-movie charm to the Nick production values) that make it tolerable, plus the presence of Barnes, hamming it up, and some interesting hints of more adult humor edging at the dialogue hold you in there for another episode.  Which is a good thing, because somewhere in the middle of the season, Jace learns how to be less camera aware and the main kid actors (his sister, Piper – Ella Anderson, his friends Charlotte and Jasper – Riele Downs and Sean Ryan Fox) all actually gain some impressive comic timing, and the episodes become legitimately entertaining and not just time wasting.  But as the season rounds the corner into its last third, while the actors continue to grow, the scripts do not: costume adventures become less and less frequent, and some questionably ignorant humor becomes more prevalent.  Soon, you’re watching any other tween show.  A two-parter late in the season brings back that temporary magic, but it’s only a reminder of how relatively small a portion of the 25 episodes these successes actually were.

Assessed from a perspective of talent, Schneider and crew know how to spot the charmers, and it is nice to see the core crew settle into a comfortable camaraderie.  However, as the show rarely fulfills – or even tries to fulfill – the slight quirk of its premise once the writers feel like they’ve established that Henry’s a hero and yadda yadda, Henry Danger overall lacks any distinction to bump it above the crowd, and thus more noticeably feels like the bandwagon bait it is.